Candy Man - Part 2

This week concludes the two-part exclusive story about Luke Davies - poet, novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of the hit movie Lion.

Having pulled himself from the depths of heroin addiction at the beginning of 1990, Luke set about rebuilding his life and career.

He wrote Candy, a semi-autobiographical account of his relationship with Megan Bannister and their years of addiction. A film adaptation followed, starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish.

Luke then gambled everything on a move to Los Angeles. However, he struggled to find work and became increasingly debilitated by the effects of Hepatitis C, a legacy of his heroin addiction.

In the past two years, however, Luke has experienced a dramatic change of fortune both personally and professionally.

With his Oscars nomination for Lion, a film about motherly love, there was no question who he would take to the ceremony - his own mother Joan, who had supported him unfailingly through all his highs and lows.

Australian Story accompanied Luke and Joan to the Oscars and filmed with him extensively in Los Angeles and Sydney.

Featuring candid interviews with Luke's parents and former partners, as well actors Dev Patel (Lion), Joel Edgerton, Jacki Weaver and Alex O'Loughlin, directors Neil Armfield and David Michod, and producer Emile Sherman, this is a remarkable story of redemption.

JACKI WEAVER, ACTOR AND FRIEND: If ever there was a redemption story, I think it's probably Luke.

LUKE DAVIES: When I think back I find it sad that at 13 years old I started to become interested in drugs.

BRIAN DAVIES, FATHER: Discovering that Luke had a heroin problem was one of the most dreadful nights of my life.

MEGAN BANNISTER, FORMER WIFE: I actually didn't like him when I first met him. But he grew on me.

LUKE DAVIES: Oh, God, we fell so in love. But it took me many years to realise that we were so attracted to each other because we were so damaged and out of control.

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: What a dreadful thing heroin is.

MEGAN BANNISTER: I just said to him, ‘Luke, I can't be around it if you're going to use again. I'm going to leave.’

LUKE DAVIES: And I wrote this little message: ‘I just can’t handle it any more, I’m going to Langton.’ And I just put like two pairs of socks and a T-shirt and a pair of underpants in a plastic bag and I walked up to the clinic.

TITLE: CANDY MAN

LUKE DAVIES: January 2nd, 1990. I go to detox. I was really sick, I was coming off forty mills of methadone.

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: I remember thinking how ill he was at times and I thought, you know, you'll be dead before your 50s.

LUKE DAVIES: I walked into this detox and said, ‘I’m sick of everything, my life is over if I don’t stop this.’ That was the beginning of me actually getting my life back.

LUKE DAVIES: When I went to Langton Clinic, the very first guy I saw was Kenny. And Joe was there a couple of hours before me.

LUKE DAVIES: There was a whole gang of us in early recovery. We learnt how friendship could be a protective force against the encroachments of relapse.

Café sceneLuke: When I turned up that day in detox I had not had anything since the day before. You were super smashed on day one. That means I’ve always been one day more clean than you, right? I’m like 27 years, 3 months and 3 days and you’re 27 years, 3 months and 2 days.

KAREN BRIEN, FORMER WIFE: When I met him the first time he was very skinny and pasty and pale. Total sort of Melbourne junkie look really. I instantly disliked him. And then the second time I got to know him was after he'd come out of Langton Clinic. I knew that he'd been through detox and he was a lot more humble. So he was a lot more likeable. He knew he had to completely change his life. And he completely changed his life.

LUKE DAVIES: So I got clean and I just assumed that I’d lost all my powers of writing.

KAREN BRIEN: He did a Dip Ed. I remember him getting the job at St Andrews Cathedral School. He had a suit and he was dressed up. And he had his old leather brief case.

LUKE DAVIES: But around about the second and the third year it was like, ah, it doesn’t feel quite right, and I started to be able to feel like the feeling in my writing hand again, you know, like, no, I can actually try something here. I finally got together a manuscript of poetry. I sent it to Angus and Robertson.

BOB ADAMSON, POETRY EDITOR: They gave me a huge pile of manuscripts. They were all terrible except one which was Luke's. Luke's just shone.

Bob reading The Boom of the Spirit in the Pit of the Gut from Absolute Event Horizon“The roll of its green thunder and the boom of the spirit booming deep inside the gutroared such a resonance of atmosphereand salt-encrusted joy …”

BOB ADAMSON: It had a combination of real experience with powerful imagination. I said to the publisher, ‘We should publish this one first. It's really exceptional.’

LUKE DAVIES: That’s how it began, getting back into writing and the believing that all I had experienced was an interrupted destiny.

JANE GLEESON-WHITE, WRITER AND FRIEND: I remember reading the first bits of Candy. It came in fragments. There'd be these beautiful poetic stretches of love and sort of ecstasy so it seemed like something to me. I mean it had the substance of a novel.

JOEL EDGERTON, ACTOR AND FRIEND: Luke was incredibly exposing of himself in writing Candy. And very raw and very honest about it. I'm sure there's shame attached to certain actions that one commits or one does or one is involved in in the midst of addiction. But I think he's not ashamed of having written about it.

DAVID MICHÔD, DIRECTOR AND FRIEND: It was poetic, you know, but it was despairing. And on that level for me the novel certainly was profoundly authentic.

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: I think I was just so proud that he'd written it. And didn't quite believe to a certain extent this was his life.

MEGAN BANNISTER, FORMER WIFE: Because I wasn't talking to Luke at the time I shoplifted the book 'cause I didn't want him to have any of my money for the book. I've actually never read the book through. I pick it up and I'll read a bit and then I'll throw it down. I find it a bit, it's a bit uncomfortable for me to read it.

KAREN BRIEN, FORMER WIFE: The book came out just after we broke up. So I've spent 20 years telling people, no, I'm not Candy.

MEGAN BANNISTER: I'm Candy. It was really when the film came out that we re-established our friendship. And I think a lot of people thought that I shouldn't have been friends with Luke in that it was exploitative but I don't think that.

LUKE DAVIES: I do see the Candy screenplay as the launch of my screenwriting career. Neil read Candy and said, ‘Why don’t we make a film of this?’

NEIL ARMFIELD, CANDY DIRECTOR: I loved his sense of humour. I loved his, honesty about himself. His sense of detail.

LUKE DAVIES: We went on writing this thing on and off for literally five years while it was impossible to find the money to make this low-budget dark Australian drama about heroin addicts. I mean, it was never gonna happen and then finally Heath Ledger came along and suddenly it was very much gonna happen.

LUKE DAVIES: It became clear to the producers that I was going to be hanging around. I would probably be annoying. Let's give Luke something to do. Let's give him a camera and he can shoot the behind-the-scenes stuff.

DAVID MICHÔD: He'd never shot anything before in his life, you know. I don't think he ever actually worked a video camera before but he just threw himself into it.

EMILE SHERMAN, CANDY PRODUCER: Candy I think was probably the trickiest for him in that, you know, it was his story.

(On set of Candy)Luke: It’s been 15 years since I did anything like tie a tourniquet or fiddle with a syringe and it’s a bit more disconcerting than I imagined it would be.

NEIL ARMFIELD: Luke became the sort of natural reference point for Geoffrey and for Abbie and for Heath about the details, the mechanics of using. I think it was probably quite bizarre for Luke.

LUKE DAVIES: There were certain things that were very, very unexpectedly difficult. And so I called Meg and said I'm making this thing.

MEGAN BANNISTER, FORMER WIFE: He rang me and suggested he come down and film me for the documentary he was making. We just sat in my loungeroom and talked about our mutual memories of that time and what had happened.

LUKE DAVIES: We talked about all this really difficult stuff. It was really uncomfortable.

(Luke and Meg on couch)Meg: It was the way we were living. The filth and the …Luke: But you know what I remember, what I just find really sad is that the tragedy of the kind of loss that we brought on through our own self-indulgence, you know. I look back at that stuff and I think that what I did in terms of what I didn’t do, like, in terms of passivity, was unacceptable, you know. I mean it’s just stuff now I realise there really are such things as moral boundaries.Meg: Yeah(Couch scene ends)

BRIAN DAVIES, FATHER: I went to the opening night of Candy but I hardly saw it at all. I didn't want to have all those memories re-awoken. I'd lived with it! I didn't want to see it again slightly glamorised on a screen.

VICTORIA THAINE, FORMER PARTNER: I met Luke 17 years ago. There was this big age difference between us but he actually joked that he had the emotional maturity of a 30-year-old rather than a 40-year-old because heroin addiction had sort of stunted his emotional growth.

JOEL EDGERTON, ACTOR AND FRIEND: Luke, obviously as a result of his Candy days, you know, had Hep C. Had contracted Hep C.

LUKE DAVIES: I got hepatitis C from the very earliest times of foolishly sharing needles. I knew that it could get worse and I knew people who died from liver failure and I eventually got on Interferon treatment.

VICTORIA THAINE: It was really tough. It affected Luke both physically and mentally. He was kind of like an old man. He'd puff going upstairs. And it perhaps heightened some of his more obsessive qualities. And so it was really hard on both of us.

BOB ADAMSON, POET AND FRIEND: But what held him together and kept his feet on the ground was poetry. He would just say, ‘I'll just keep writing poetry about it.’ And that's when, that's where Interferon, the Interferon Psalms came from.

(Luke reading extract from Interferon Psalms) “The blood became needy, I went to bed sick. Night after night the utter deprivation. Because I was very good at sabotage.”(Extract ends)

VICTORIA THAINE: Luke had to turn up to the hospital to find out whether the interferon treatment had worked or not.

LUKE DAVIES: I go to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the minute I saw the nurse I knew that it had failed. She just had this look of sympathy. So that was like a devastating like, ‘Oh my God now I’m gonna die sooner than I thought.’

VICTORIA THAINE: Both Luke and I were going to go over to Los Angeles, myself to pursue acting and Luke was, perhaps on a less serious journey just to feel out what opportunities there might be for him there.

LUKE DAVIES: I was like, ‘Well, I’ll just come to America with you and I’ll see if I can get a meeting and find an agent.’ And then at that exact moment the relationship ended.

VICTORIA THAINE: So he did really land in Los Angeles alone, reeling from this break-up and starting from the bottom.

JACKI WEAVER, ACTOR AND FRIEND: It's interesting that he chose Hollywood. A lot of people, literary minded people, would go to England. But he's an intellectual in Hollywood.

DAVID MICHÔD, DIRECTOR AND FRIEND: At some point Luke was probably going to end up in America because he’d been obsessed with it since he was a little kid.

EMILE SHERMAN, CANDY PRODUCER: It was an incredibly bold move. You know, he wasn't an established screenwriter. He'd done Candy but hadn't done a huge amount else.

LUKE DAVIES: The initial months or year or two of breaking into the business in Los Angeles was really just a situation of abject failure at every turn with every attempt. There was just a hustle and a scramble really. Alex O’Loughlin was my really good friend and flatmate for all those years.

ALEX O’LOUGHLIN, ACTOR AND FRIEND: I watched him struggle financially. I watched him struggle emotionally. It's a rare to hear Luke say, ‘I don't know what to do, this is really hard.’ And I heard that a couple of times.

LUKE DAVIES: It was like 20 or 30 thousand dollars of maxed-out credit cards. It was the sort of $10,000 back rent owing to Alex O'Loughlin.

JANE GLEESON-WHITE, WRITER AND FRIEND: And then of course as always with Luke, magic things happen. And he won the inaugural Prime Minister's prize for Poetry.

DAVID MICHÔD, DIRECTOR AND FRIEND: That was like a gift drop from heaven for Luke, I think. I mean remember at that time when he won the Prime Minister's award he was about as broke as he'd ever been.

LUKE DAVIES: To win the Prime Minister’s Literary Award was amazing because it’s $80,000. It was literally just like pay back all my debts, clear the credit cards and have enough change to survive for another year. Eventually things happened. One little tiny thing happened after another.

LUKE DAVIES: It was See Saw films who came to me and said we got this book based on this amazing story of this kid, Saroo, who got lost and found his home through Google Earth.

GARTH DAVIS, LION DIRECTOR: I could just feel something in his writing that I felt could work for Lion. And there was a beautiful sensitivity in it. There was a subtlety and a humanity that I really loved. I couldn't find that in other writers.

LUKE DAVIES: So I got the job and worked with Garth for a week or two throwing the ideas around and then I went off and wrote the treatment.

DEV PATEL, ACTOR: I got sent a news article about Saroo's story. And I was so captured by this young man's strength, his resilience. And I called my agents up and was pestering them, I was like, if there's a film being made I need to be a part of this. So I ended up driving to Luke's home in Los Angeles where he was staying. I knocked on the door and Luke opened it and he's, hey! And I saw behind them there was a big white board with all these stickies on it. And they hadn't even begun putting pen to page and they were still story boarding and I was there trying to pitch myself for the lead role. So it was very premature.

GARTH DAVIS, LION DIRECTOR: It was just a weird moment, like, we hadn't even finished the script and here's Dev Patel fighting for the role. And drinking ginger tea with Luke.

LUKE DAVIES: And then I went off and wrote the script. And everything happened from there.

DEV PATEL, ACTOR: It was the first time I'd read a script and I went home that night and I was in tears first of all. And I went to bed and I literally prayed that I hope one day these words pass my lips. They were so precious and delicate.

(Excerpt from Lion)Dev Patel: Sorry you couldn’t have your own kidsNicole Kidman: What are you saying?Dev Patel: We weren’t blank pages were we?Nicole Kidman: We could have had kids(Excerpt ends)

LUKE DAVIES: Garth Davis had already said to me: ‘I see the two spiritual pillars of this film as the two mothers – Kamla, the biological mother, and Sue Brierley, Saroo’s adoptive mother.’ The thing that they hold up is Saroo’s amazing journey through the film to find his mother.

(60 Minutes vision)Sue Brierley: So I need to know, did you always believe Saroo was still alive? Kamla: (via translator): I always knew in my heart that not only was he alive, but he would come back to me one day. That either he would come back to me or I would find him. I always knew this in my heart. (Vision ends)

LUKE DAVIES: I went to India and I did all these amazing things with Saroo. I went to all the real places – the train station, the orphanage, his hometown. But meeting Kamla was very intense. Saroo was there and he and his mother sat there stroking each other for two hours while I asked all these questions. And she wept and wept and wept. Every single question I asked about the past just made her cry so deeply and profoundly and it was very, very uncomfortable and I kept apologising with every question and she kept saying, “No, no, no, I want to do this, I want to do this”.

JACKI WEAVER, ACTOR AND FRIEND: I've heard Luke say that the theme underneath Lion, one of the themes, is finding one's mother.

Excerpt from LionDev Patel: I’m not from Calcutta. I’m lost

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: It was just wondrous. And you could just in parts of it you can hear Luke the way he actually does talk.

Excerpt from LionDev Patel: Do you have any idea what it’s like knowing my real brother and mother spend every day of their lives looking for me. How every day my real brother screams my name.

BRIAN DAVIES, FATHER: The screenplay seems to me to be an extension of his work as a poet.

DEV PATEL, ACTOR: There's a sparseness to the film, particularly in the first half where you're following this young boy. And not much is said but the way he paints those pictures and creates the atmosphere of this young boy trying to survive in this very suffocating environment surrounded by predators was beautiful.

LUKE DAVIES: I was also getting really sick from the Hepatitis C.

GARTH DAVIS, LION DIRECTOR: Definitely the Hepatitis C thing was affecting him immensely. When I worked with him he would get very tired.

LUKE DAVIES: Life was physically demanding. I was beginning to get whispers from doctors that this was bad trouble on the horizon and that my liver was in a very bad state.

GARTH DAVIS, LION DIRECTOR: And I knew that he was very worried about that. Worried about whether he could get a treatment while he was in America. And I could really feel that was a cloud that was over him.

ALEX O’LOUGHLIN, ACTOR AND FRIEND: I was scared. I was scared that I was going to lose one of my best mates. I remember this one conversation we had out on the front balcony. We talked about the fact that he might die, you know. That this could be, this could be a reality, you know. And I was really struggling to process this.

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: I knew at that stage that he was told that he would only live 'til he was about 54. And that was heartbreaking. But I thought there would be some breakthrough. There'll be something will happen.

LUKE DAVIES: I got Writer’s Guild health insurance and that made it possible to get on this new wonder drug that is curing the world of hep C.

BRIAN DAVIES, FATHER: Luke has been fortunate in enjoying good luck. And I felt that he would whatever he might be suffering from, he would recover from.

LUKE DAVIES: That was a six-month treatment, 2015, and exactly a year ago last month I learned that the treatment succeeded. Now I’m understanding how sick I was for much of the last decade because now I’m feeling not sick [laughs].

JOAN DAVIES: I never felt I lost him. I knew it was going to be okay. I was just certain.

MEGAN BANNISTER: I don't feel crippled by the past. I’m happily married and Charlotte my daughter had a little girl on the 20th of January called Poppy, so that’s pretty amazing. So I'm a grandmother. So, yeah, things even out or balance out.

Luke greeting his mother at Los Angeles airport

LUKE DAVIES: I just think that I put my mother through so much suffering and that she so patiently believed that this was not the real me.

JACKI WEAVER, ACTOR AND FRIEND: I've often thought what it must have been like for Joan. And that's why I was so looking forward to meeting her. To see your boy go from such levels of despair to such triumph. I mean it must be amazing for her.

EMILE SHERMAN, LION PRODUCER: I think there's no doubt that Lion is a massive game changer for Luke. If you're nominated for an Academy Award, your quote as they say in Hollywood has gone up, dramatically and massively. It feels like Luke's moment's come.

JACKI WEAVER: She must be so proud. She was already proud but seeing Lion must have really touched her heart that he's written a story about an extraordinary mother.

At Luke’s house preparing for the OscarsLuke: They’re the Oscar’s tickets and they are the Governor’s Ball tickets. Admit one, admit one. OK, you look beautiful.Joan: Aww, thank you Luke.

(In car on way to Oscars)Luke: Thank you for coming all the wayJoan: Oh, Luke, I’m the one who should be thanking you boy.(Ends)

LUKE DAVIES: You know, I just got to bring my own mother to the Oscars. There was just something about this moment in time, the ability to say, ‘Mum, no, I want you to come here and be my plus one at the Oscars’ that felt pretty special.

JOAN DAVIES, MOTHER: I was just so, so happy to be with him.

BRIAN DAVIES, FATHER: He certainly has made up for the damage caused during those dark, dark, dark years. He's certainly filled in the credit side of the book. I thought I'd never get over it but, you know, time really does heal everything.

EMILE SHERMAN, LION PRODUCER: I don't think you could invent Luke's story. You know, the incredible journey he's gone through even to get to this point.

LUKE DAVIES: I get that it’s a redemption story, but I know so many people for whom getting clean is the redemption story. I feel unbelievably lucky that this obsession that began when I was 13 years old, when I knew that I'm going to be a writer, that I survived this thing that I shouldn't have survived. That's more the story for me.